1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns an aircraft, in particular a missile.
To be more precise, the present invention concerns a guidance device necessitating human intervention, namely a guidance device of the type including:
an image sensor mounted on said aircraft or on the ground and generating images of the environment ahead of said aircraft; PA1 data transmission means; PA1 a guidance station receiving the images generated by said image sensor through the intermediary of said data transmission means and enabling an operator to select on each image a guide point to which they wish to guide said aircraft; and PA1 calculating means which determine instructions for guiding the aircraft on the basis of the guide points thus selected, said guidance instructions being transmitted to guidance units mounted on said aircraft. PA1 a reduction in the designation time because the operator's finger or the light pen goes directly to the chosen point, which remedies the problems of designation oscillations in the usual solution previously mentioned; and PA1 an increase in the accuracy of designation, in particular when a light pen is used, the end of which is finer than that of a finger.
2. Description of Related Art
It is known that there is an increasing requirement for human intervention for guiding airborne weapons such as antitank missiles, for example, since only such intervention can efficiently deal with the increasingly complex situations (such as distinguishing between friends, foes and neutrals) encountered in present and/or future conflicts (political crisis, peacekeeping operation, . . . ).
Generally speaking, said guide station comprises a console provided with a screen for viewing the images generated by said image sensor and a joystick for controlling the movement of designation cross-hairs on said screen. To guide the aircraft the operator moves said designation cross-hairs to the selected point on said image, i.e. the point that the aircraft is to reach, for example the center of a target.
However, any such mode of guidance has many drawbacks and in particular delicate manipulation and difficult and slow optimization.
Because the operator often finds it difficult to master the relationship between the force they apply to the joystick and the speed and magnitude of the displacement of the designation cross-hairs on the screen, designation is generally accompanied by oscillations about the selected position that are damped to a greater or lesser degree, which obviously leads to a relatively long designation time (approximately one second in the best case) and random accuracy.